I recently took an IT #leadership role with a biotechnology company where software development is a critical capability and had the opportunity to build a Project Management Organization (PMO) from scratch. This essay represents my #agile and pragmatic point of view on project management and organizational change management.Have a Vision.What does a Good PMO capability look like? Write it down as the PMO charter document. Your team will need this mission statement, principles, and responsibilities as well as SMART metrics for how you will measure success. This is your truth and it will seed the culture that grows and guides the team around you.In my case, my mission statement went something like this:“Our Project Management Office (PMO) is a service-oriented capability whose purpose is (...)

The new world requires a new skillset. Are you prepared?The first world is shifting towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Defined as the fusion of technologies which blur the lines between the digital, physical and biological spheres. With advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, The Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing and autonomous vehicles characterizing it.In this new era, often called the Information Economy — workers aren’t valued for their productivity on the assembly line, or for their ability to work productively as a cog within a larger machine. They’re valued for their ability to innovate rapidly to outpace their competition. From 1955 to 2016 only 12% of the Fortune 500 companies have maintained their place atop the (...)

In 2008, John Porter, a Washington, D.C. lawyer and former Republican member of Congress, stood in front of a group of scientists at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and urged them to make their cases to the media and to the people. “America needs you,” Porter said, “fighting for science.” At the time, the number of science articles in American newspapers had shrunk dramatically. Science on television also suffered. CNN dismissed its entire science, space, environment, and technology unit. According to a National Science Foundation report, network nightly news programs from 2000 to 2012 devoted less than 2 percent of air time to science, space, and technology, and less than 1 percent to biotechnology and basic medical research. Nonetheless, (...)

Things like Jeopardy, Go, or Chess aren’t tasks that we need to do. They were always activities that give you bragging rights. Except for game playing as an end in itself, our ancestors did not depend on being able to win those games. They were representative of intellectual skills that would be beneficial, like the ability to be a good businessperson. The point is, in order for a computer to win at those games, they have to use 100,000 watts of power continuously while a human brain is using 20 watts. Admittedly, the body it’s in is using another 80 watts, and maybe that body has creature comforts that require more watts, but the fact is we’re very energy-efficient for doing this. Humans are also doing a lot more than losing games of Chess, Go, and Jeopardy; we’re worrying about our family, about our careers, and about existential risk. We’re doing all kinds of things that computers can’t yet do. The thing is we’re ahead, and biotechnology is going faster than computer technology.

Artificial wombs are a staple of science fiction, but could we really build one? As time passes, we’re inching closer and closer to the day when it will finally become possible to grow a baby entirely outside the human body. Here’s what we’ll need to do to pull it off.

Top image by Mondolithic Studios.More than just an incubator

A fully functional artificial uterus will be substantially more complex than a modern incubator, a clunky (and somewhat obtrusive) device that provides a preemie with oxygen, protection from cold, hydration and nutrition (via intravenous catheter or NG tube), and adequate levels of humidity.Recent Video from GizmodoView More >The World’s First Ping-Pong Robot01/11/2018

Even in the best of cases, the current state-of-the-art doesn’t allow for viability outside of the womb until mid to late second trimester. Prior to that, a mother’s womb is the only option. Quite obviously, future incubators, or a full-blown artificial uterus, will push the limits of viability further and further until the entire gestational cycle can happen external to the body.

We’re still several decades away, but the two primary areas that need to be developed include biotechnology (for things like personalized genomics and tissue engineering) and nanotechnology (to facilitate micro-scale interactions and growth through artificial means). Smart computer systems and monitoring devices should also be developed to track the progress of the fetus’s growth, while automatically adjusting for changing conditions.

Why go through all this trouble to change the color of the fruit? The Arctic’s non-browning properties mean it can be sold pre-sliced, which the company says makes it more appealing as a snack food for kids. And unlike other prepackaged apple slices, “our non-browning sliced apples are preservative free, avoiding negative flavor and aroma impacts of anti-browning treatments,” Okanagan President Neal Carter told me.

Et l’argument écologiste en prime

And if the apples stay white, we’re less likely to toss them out, according to the Breakthrough Institute, which is helping promote the fruit: “By eliminating superficial bruising and browning, the Arctic Apple holds the potential to dramatically reduce consumer food waste once it enters the market.” Food makes up the largest share of waste at municipal landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Around the world, almost half of all fruits and vegetables are wasted every year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, and that includes a startling 3.7 trillion apples.Okanagan Specialty Fruits Inc.

But if the point of the apple is to help reduce food waste, why market it in a way that requires so much packaging? I asked the company, and it responded that the plastic bags are recyclable, as are the shipping cartons and trays. Still, it’s hard to see how whole apples would require as much plastic, recyclable or not.

Et la mention OGM n’est pas sur l’emballage

ut the Arctic apples are one of the first genetically modified foods created to please consumers, rather than farmers. “It’s good for people to bite into one of these apples and see in their own hand how simple it is,” says Professor Pam Ronald, a plant pathologist and geneticist at the University of California-Davis. “It tastes the same.”If you come across a packet of Arctic apple slices in stores, it won’t say “GM” on the label.

That’s only if they know what they’re eating. A law signed in 2016 by President Barack Obama requires companies to reveal whether a product is genetically modified, but it does not force them to print that information on its packaging. If you come across a packet of Arctic apple slices in stores, it won’t say “GM” on the label. Instead, there will be a QR code on the back that you can scan with a smartphone to learn more about Okanagan and the biotechnology at work.

This version, the sixth in the series, is titled, “Global Trends: The Paradox of Progress,” and we are proud of it. It may look like a report, but it is really an invitation, an invitation to discuss, debate and inquire further about how the future could unfold. Certainly, we do not pretend to have the definitive “answer.”

Long-term thinking is critical to framing strategy. The Global Trends series pushes us to reexamine key assumptions, expectations, and uncertainties about the future. In a very messy and interconnected world, a longer perspective requires us to ask hard questions about which issues and choices will be most consequential in the decades ahead–even if they don’t necessarily generate the biggest headlines. A longer view also is essential because issues like terrorism, cyberattacks, biotechnology, and climate change invoke high stakes and will require sustained collaboration to address.

Peering into the future can be scary and surely is humbling. Events unfold in complex ways for which our brains are not naturally wired. Economic, political, social, technological, and cultural forces collide in dizzying ways, so we can be led to confuse recent, dramatic events with the more important ones. It is tempting, and usually fair, to assume people act “rationally,” but leaders, groups, mobs, and masses can behave very differently—and unexpectedly—under similar circumstances. For instance, we had known for decades how brittle most regimes in the Middle East were, yet some erupted in the Arab Spring in 2011 and others did not. Experience teaches us how much history unfolds through cycles and shifts, and still human nature commonly expects tomorrow to be pretty much like today—which is usually the safest bet on the future until it is not. I always remind myself that between Mr. Reagan’s “evil empire” speech and the demise of that empire, the Soviet Union, was only a scant decade, a relatively short time even in a human life.

Grasping the future is also complicated by the assumptions we carry around in our heads, often without quite knowing we do. I have been struck recently by the “prosperity presumption” that runs deep in most Americans but is often hardly recognized. We assume that with prosperity come all good things—people are happier, more democratic and less likely to go to war with one another. Yet, then we confront a group like ISIL, which shares none of the presumption.

Given these challenges to thinking about the future, we have engaged broadly and tried to stick to analytic basics rather than seizing any particular worldview. Two years ago, we started with exercises identifying key assumptions and uncertainties—the list of assumptions underlying US foreign policy was stunningly long, many of them half-buried. We conducted research and consulted with numerous experts in and outside the US Government to identify and test trends. We tested early themes and arguments on a blog. We visited more than 35 countries and one territory, soliciting ideas and feedback from over 2,500 people around the world from all walks of life. We developed multiple scenarios to imagine how key uncertainties might result in alternative futures. The NIC then compiled and refined the various streams into what you see here.

This edition of Global Trends revolves around a core argument about how the changing nature of power is increasing stress both within countries and between countries, and bearing on vexing transnational issues. The main section lays out the key trends, explores their implications, and offers up three scenarios to help readers imagine how different choices and developments could play out in very different ways over the next several decades. Two annexes lay out more detail. The first lays out five-year forecasts for each region of the world. The second provides more context on the key global trends in train.

The fact that the National Intelligence Council regularly publishes an unclassified assessment of the world surprises some people, but our intent is to encourage open and informed discussions about future risks and opportunities. Moreover, Global Trends is unclassified because those screens of secrets that dominate our daily work are not of much help in peering out beyond a year or two. What is a help is reaching out not just to experts and government officials but also to students, women’s groups, entrepreneurs, transparency advocates, and beyond.

Many minds and hands made this project happen. The heavy lifting was done by the NIC’s Strategic Futures Group, directed by Dr. Suzanne Fry, with her very talented team: Rich Engel, Phyllis Berry, Heather Brown, Kenneth Dyer, Daniel Flynn, Geanetta Ford, Steven Grube, Terrence Markin, Nicholas Muto, Robert Odell, Rod Schoonover, Thomas Stork, and dozens of Deputy National Intelligence Officers. We recognize as well the thoughtful, careful review by NIC editors, as well as CIA’s extremely talented graphic and web designers and production team.

Global Trends represents how the NIC is thinking about the future. It does not represent the official, coordinated view of the US Intelligence Community nor US policy. Longtime readers will note that this edition does not reference a year in the title (the previous edition was Global Trends 2030) because we think doing so conveys a false precision. For us, looking over the “long term” spans the next several decades, but we also have made room in this edition to explore the next five years to be more relevant in timeline for a new US administration.

My own work has also taken a political and critical approach to working with biotechnology. With Stranger Visions, in 2012, I created portraits of strangers from their abandoned DNA. I began by collecting genetic artifacts I found in public: hair, cigarette butts, chewed-up gum. I learned how to extract DNA, how to sequence it, and how to analyze it to generate a portrait of what someone might look like based on an interpretation of their DNA, utilizing scientific research ranging from the established to the speculative. I 3-D printed the portraits life size, in full color, and exhibited these alongside documentation of the artifact, where and when it was collected, and what I analyzed.Stranger Visions (installation view)

The work was meant to call attention to the vulnerability of the body to new forms of surveillance and to predict the future direction of forensic DNA phenotyping—the profiling of a person’s outward characteristics from their DNA. At the time there were clear signals this research was happening, but it hadn’t been publicly discussed.

Two years later the prediction came true with the launch of Parabon Nanolabs DNA “Snapshot”, offering genomic mugshots to police around the country. The danger of offering stereotypes based primarily on sex and ancestry predictions is that a black box algorithm in the hands of the police can become a new form of racial profiling which appears to have the authority of real genetic evidence.

Most recently, I worked with Chelsea Manning. Subject to a strict policy of visitation and representation, Chelsea’s image had been suppressed since her sentencing and gender transition in 2013. She realized that DNA could give her a kind of visibility or presence that she had been stripped of for years. Chelsea didn’t want to appear too masculine in the portraits. I realized it was a perfect opportunity to highlight the reductionism of DNA phenotyping. Instead of producing one portrait to represent her, I generated two: one that was algorithmically gender “neutral” and one parameterized “female.” I presented the two portraits side by side to focus attention on the limitations of this technique even in regards to a genetic trait considered “legible.”

Just as the libertarian fraction of the cyberpunks fantasizes about the singularity putting the mind into software, biopunk-driven positivism fantasizes about DNA code being the instructions for life itself. “We have discovered the secret of life.” This was how Watson and Crick bragged about their discovery of the DNA double helix after poaching the work of their colleague Rosalind Franklin. Code is the ultimate dream.

#Génomique#biopunk#23andme#surveillanceSo let’s imagine what happens as this runs its course. What will evolve from biohacking, taking into consideration what we have said so far?

Since 2008 Bio Ammo Ltd has been dedicated to development, manufacturing and distribution of biodegradable ammunition.

For many years the lands and waters have been contaminated with used plastic ammunition and its parts. The problem of plastic wastes becomes bigger from one year to another, causing a huge impact on environment.

Our company found ecological solution to this problem. We achieved the goal by combining biotechnology, environmental care and ammunition, brining you the unique product of high quality, product which is non-toxic, pollution-free and biodegradable.

The range of our patented products includes biodegradable pellet for airsoft and military training, cartridge for hunting and shooting sports and biodegradable bullet for firearms.

#AltWoke is a new awakening for the post-modern Left to navigate the protean digital era. #Altwoke can be categorized as the new New Left. Or Second Wave Neo Marxism. The Post- Truth Left. Anti-liberal postcapitalist left. #AltWoke is antithetical to Silicone Valley techno-neoliberalism. #AltWoke is not the cult of Kurzweil. #AltWoke is not merely analogous to the Alt-Right. #AltWoke injects planning back into left-wing politics. #AltWoke supports universal basic income, biotechnology & radical energy reforms to combat climate change, open borders, new forms of urban planning & the liquidation of Western hegemony. AltWoke sees opportunity in disaster. #AltWoke is the Left taking futurism away from fascism. David Harvey is #altwoke. Situationist International is #altwoke. Jean Baudrillard is #altwoke. Roberto Mangabeira Unger is #altwoke. Eric Snowden is #altwoke. Daniel Keller is #altwoke. Chelsea Manning is #altwoke. William Gibson is #altwoke. Holly Herndon is #altwoke. Franz Fanon is #altwoke. Alvin Toffler is #altwoke.

It’s hard to tell precisely how big a role biotechnology plays in our economy, because it infiltrates so many parts of it. Genetically modified organisms such as microbes and plants now create medicine, food, fuel, and even fabrics. Recently, Robert Carlson, of the biotech firm Biodesic and the investment firm Bioeconomy Capital, decided to run the numbers and ended up with an eye-popping estimate. He concluded that in 2012, the last year for which good data are available, revenues from biotechnology in the United States alone were over $324 billion. “If we talk about mining or several manufacturing sectors, biotech is bigger than those,” said Carlson. “I don’t think people appreciate that.”MATCHMAKER: Biotech pioneer Hamilton Smith chose to study recombination in a species of bacteria (...)

All of the food you’ve ever eaten was made with sunlight captured by plants just a few months or years before you ate it. But some of the energy on your plate could soon come from sunlight captured by plants millions of years ago, thanks to plans to feed livestock with fossil fuels.

A biotechnology company called Calysta, based in Menlo Park, California, is set to announce the first ever large-scale factory that uses microbes to turn natural gas – methane – into a high-protein food for the animals we eat. The factory, which will be built in the US in collaboration with food-giant Cargill, will produce 200,000 tonnes of feed a year.

Since beginning to normalize relations with the United States in 2014, Cuba has become a hot tourist draw with its unspoiled beaches and vibrant night life. But the country also has a robust biotechnology industry that has generated an innovative vaccine called Cimavax. It is part of a new chapter of cancer treatment known as immunotherapy, which prompts the body’s immune system to attack the disease.

[...]

“There’s no doubt that without this medicine, I would be dead,” said Mick Phillips, 69, of Appleton, Wis., who first went to Cuba in 2012 and has been returning annually ever since. “When we were children, we were taught that Cubans didn’t know what they were doing. Turns out they do.”

[...]

The Cuban health care system has long been recognized for providing high-quality health care. A 2015 report on the Cuban health system by the World Health Organization noted, “In Cuba, products were developed to solve pressing health problems, unlike in other countries, where commercial interests prevailed.”

In 2015, for the first time, the acreage used for the crops declined, according to a nonprofit that tracks the plantings of biotech seeds.

The organization said the main cause for the decline, which measured 1 percent from 2014 levels, was low commodity prices, which led farmers to plant less corn, soybeans and canola of all types, both genetically engineered and nonengineered.

But the figures for the last few years show that the existing market for the crops has nearly been saturated.

Only three countries — the United States, Brazil and Argentina — account for more than three-quarters of the total global acreage. And only four crops — corn, soybeans, cotton and canola — account for the majority of biotechnology use in agriculture. In many cases, more than 90 percent of those four crops grown in those three countries, and in other large growers like Canada, India and China, is already genetically modified, leaving little room for expansion.

Efforts to expand use of biotechnology to other crops and to other countries have been hindered by opposition from consumer and environmental groups, regulatory hurdles and in some cases scientific obstacles.

Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets in Argentina to protest Monsanto following news of an impending eviction at a key resistance camp blocking a huge Monsanto GMO seed plant in the agricultural province of Cordoba.

Protests in Buenos Aires and other major cities on Friday slammed Monsanto over the dangers of widespread use of toxic agrochemicals on large-scale export crops like GMO soy and corn that cover large swathes of agricultural areas, shouting slogans like “Monsanto, get out!”

...

Argentina is the world’s largest soybean producer, and Monsanto sees the country as a target for future growth.

According to activists, the province of Cordoba where Monsanto wants to build the GMO plant is suffering an “environmental emergency.”

The movement against Monsanto, agrochemicals, and GMOs in Argentina is part of a larger mobilization of social organizations and researchers across Latin America that have also spoken out against Monsanto products in pursuit of wider ban of the biotechnology company in the region.

Shkreli has been “charged with illegally taking stock from Retrophin Inc., a biotechnology firm he started in 2011, and using it to pay off debts from unrelated business dealings,” according to Bloomberg.

Turing Pharmaceuticals AG’s decision to raise the price of a decades-old drug it company acquired by 50-fold was a “perversion of the system,” said the leader of one of the U.S. largest biotechnology companies and the incoming head of the drug industry’s lobby group.The pricing decision by Martin Shkreli, Turing’s founder and chief executive officer, “dropped down a storm on the whole industry" that drugmakers don’t deserve, Biogen Inc. Chief Executive Officer George Scangos said Friday in a telephone interview. He called the move by Turing’s CEO “arrogant” and “naïve.”Scangos is next in line to be chairman of the pharmaceutical industry’s Washington lobbying group, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, which has defended drugmakers this year as they’ve come under criticism for the price of medicine.

DARPA’s new vision is simply to revolutionize the human situation and it is fully #transhumanist in its approach.

The Biological Technologies Office or BTO was announced with little fanfare in the spring of 2014. (...)

DARPA (...) held a two day event in the SIlicon Valley area to facilitate and communicate about radical changes ahead in the area of #biotechnologies. Invitees included some of the top biotechnology scientists in the world. And the audience was a mixed group of scientists, engineers, inventors, investors, futurists, along with a handful of government contractors and military personnel.

(...) Following the inspirational presentation by Dr. Ling, the individual program managers had a chance to present their projects.

The first Program Manager to present, Phillip Alvelda, opened the event with his mind blowing project to develop a working “cortical modem”. What is a cortical modem you ask? Quite simply it is a direct neural interface that will allow for the visual display of information without the use of glasses or goggles. I was largely at this event to learn about this project and I wasn’t disappointed.

Leveraging the work of Karl Deisseroth in the area of optogenetics, the cortical modem project aims to build a low cost neural interface based display device. (...)

According to its proposents, synthetic biology would seem to be leading us into a brighter future, full of promises of better medicines, anti-pollution bacteria and synthetic fuels. But whilst it continues to attract investments from the largest global companies in the biotechnology, #Energy and agribusiness sectors, the use of lab-built DNA and of patented gene factories to produce life at industrial scale raises many questions. As the first fully computer-designed organisms are just (...)

Social SciencesThe Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race, Bosch Public Policy Lecture

In this lecture, Myles Jackson will explain how he has used the CCR5 gene as a heuristic tool to probe three critical developments in biotechnology from 1990 to 2010: gene patenting, HIV/AIDS diagnostics and therapeutics, and race and genomics. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Jackson ties together intellectual property, the sociology of race, and molecular biology by showing how certain patent regimes have rewarded different forms of intellectual property. The decision to patent genes was not inevitable, Jackson argues, nor “natural.” Likewise, there is nothing inevitable about using race as a major category of human classification. Jackson explains the economic and political interests that rationalized those choices — and explains the alternatives. He attempts to resurrect the past in order to illustrate the alternative paths not taken and explain why they were never chosen.

All told, the opponents of GMO labeling disclosed $15.2m in #lobbying expenditures for the second quarter of 2014, bringing the six-month total for 2014 to $27.5m. That compared with $9.3m disclosed on lobbying the issue by food and biotechnology companies in 2013, according to EWG, a Washington-based nonprofit that supports GMO labeling.

In contrast, supporters of GMO labeling disclosed $1.9m in lobbying expenditures for the first half of 2014, up slightly from $1.6m spent in 2013.

The expenditures by food and biotechnology companies come as the group pushes for passage of a bill introduced in April by US representative Mike Pompeo that would block state laws that require GMO labeling on food packages.

Vermont in May became the first US state to pass a mandatory GMO labeling law that requires no other trigger to become effective. More than 20 other states are considering mandatory labeling of GMO foods, including Colorado and Oregon, which have the issue on the ballot for the November election.

The outcome at the polls comes after corporate food and agriculture interests put $36 million into anti-labeling campaigns in the two states. The same group, which includes the biotech seed and chemical companies Monsanto and DuPont, helped defeat labeling measures in California and Washington state in 2012 and 2013.

Ferrofluid on VimeoThis dancing, Flubber-like substance may look like the stuff of science fiction. But it is very real and has some promising scientific applications.Ferrofluid is composed of iron-containing particles in water or an organic solvent. Magnets are used to manipulate the shape and direction of the fluid. Over the last 50 years, the versatile liquid has found a variety of applications, from loud speakers to intelligent body armor, but new research suggests ferrofluid could also revolutionize medical science. Chris Suprock, an engineer from Suprock Technologies, recently developed... (...)

a vaccine for malaria that, in early trials, was 100 percent effective. (...) Sanaria, a biotechnology founded in 2003 by long-time malaria researcher Stephen Hoffman and based in a suburb of Washington(...) reported that in a Phase I clinical trial whose participants were consenting U.S. veterans, the vaccine administered at the higher of two doses kept all the patients who got it from becoming infected with malaria when bitten by mosquitos carrying Plasmodium falciparum, which causes 98 percent of all malaria deaths. This year, the company will conduct trials in the U.S., Mali, Tanzania, Equatorial Guinea and Germany.